The present embodiment relates generally to an interactive education system for teaching patient care, and more particularly to such a system having virtual instruments for use with a child birthing patient simulator in conducting patient care activity.
While it is desirable to train students in patient care protocols before allowing contact with real patients, textbooks and flash cards lack the important benefit to students attained from “hands-on” practice. Thus, patient care education has often been taught using medical instruments to perform patient care activity on a simulator, such as a manikin. However, one disadvantage of such a system is that medical instruments are often prohibitively expensive, and consequently, many users must settle for using a smaller variety of instruments, even at the cost of a less comprehensive educational experience. One solution to the foregoing problem is using a set of relatively inexpensive, simulated medical instruments (“virtual” instruments), as taught in U.S. Pat. No. 5,853,292, the entire disclosure of which is hereby incorporated by reference.
Another problem in patient care education is that the patient simulators used for teaching a user are generally passive. For example, in a child birthing simulation, a user must position the simulated fetus in a simulated maternal pelvis, move it down the birth canal, birth the fetus's head, rotate the fetus approximately ninety degrees to birth the shoulders, and finally, pull out the fetus, now referred to as a neonate. While replicating the sequence of events in a real delivery, the lack of verisimilitude resulting from physical manipulation of the fetus by the user undermines an appreciation for the difficulties of providing patient care. In a real delivery, the fetus is inaccessible, and most activity is obscured from view, and thus prior systems fail to address the most challenging conditions of providing patient care during child birthing. Moreover, prior systems fail to simulate cervical dilation as the fetus moves down the birth canal, thus failing to allow a student to assess the stage of delivery or construct a chart of cervical dilation versus time to assess the progress of delivery (“Partograph”).
Therefore, what is needed is a system for an interactive education system for use in conducting patient care training sessions using relatively inexpensive virtual instruments in cooperation with a more realistic simulated patient, thereby enabling a user to learn comprehensive multiple and interrelated patient care skills.